


A Suspicion of Feelings

by beethechange



Series: Sex Toys, But Make it Feelings [2]
Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Accidental Peace Lily Acquisition, Anal Sex, Clothes Sharing, M/M, Mutual Pining, Porn with Feelings, Prostate Massage, Ryan still has a secret drawer, Shane is still a nosy fuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-29 07:12:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16739461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: Ryan’s not precious about sex, and they’ve already done it once. It should be the easiest thing in the world for Ryan to be like, “Hey, remember that time I penetrated you with a variety of sex toys? Let’s do that again some time.”But every time he thinks about saying it something twinges inside him, deep, that stops him in his tracks. He feels—on the hook. Like he has something to lose.Ryan’s living in his worst nightmare: a PG-rated romantic comedy, the kind that airs on the Hallmark Channel in December. The kind where all the characters learn the true meaning of Christmas but nobody comes.





	A Suspicion of Feelings

**Author's Note:**

> I had originally conceived of “Hold Your Breath, It Gets Better” as a one-shot, but here we are. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ This is a direct sequel to Hold Your Breath, so I do recommend reading that first. If you don’t want to do that, my authorial summary is as follows: they had sex and now they’re being weird about it. 
> 
> The line “Well mark me down as scared and horny” is from SNL.
> 
> Thank you to Paulie/aspookycryptidsock for the beta, and for gently correcting the occasional rogue homophone!

*

After Ryan ushers Shane into the vast and rewarding world of butt stuff, it gets weird.

Like, obviously it gets weird, right? Shower singalongs or no, it was naïve of Ryan to assume that there was an outcome here that wouldn’t end with shit getting weird. You don’t spend a whole night watching The Tudors with your good buddy and then inserting things inside him and then _washing his hair_ like a _boyfriend_ without things going off the rails.

They don’t fight. They don’t stop talking. They just stop talking the way normal humans talk to each other, and start talking to each other like Ryan talked to his very first girlfriend back in middle school.

It’s like Ryan’s caught in one extended “no, you hang up first!” phone call. His mom’s yelling at him to get off the damn phone and his brother’s complaining that he’s got to make a call and his father’s grouching that they pay 99 cents a minute after nine on weeknights. Ryan’s emotionally exhausted and he wants to get off the phone and go to sleep, but he can’t hang up first because then he’ll _lose_.

It’s exactly like that, except he’s an almost-twenty-eight-year-old man, his middle school girlfriend is Shane, and instead of on the phone at night it’s _all the time_. It’s at work, the place where he goes to make money to feed himself and buy sneakers and which he cannot therefore opt out of.

They just have endless circular conversations where nobody says anything meaningful, and nobody says the word sex or even suggests that either of them might at any point have ever thought about sex, let alone had it, let alone had it _together_. And then Ryan goes home and jerks off about it.

The problem is that Ryan’s the sort of person who gets hyperfixated. He’d jumped in headfirst because Shane had asked so nicely, but now all he can think about is doing it again, and why haven’t they done it again, and why haven’t they at least _talked_ about doing it again? And if they’re not gong to do it again, why haven’t they talked about not doing it?

Ryan had definitely been under the impression that Shane also wanted to do it again, at the time, but he’s no longer sure that’s the case. In the moment and the immediate aftermath Shane had seemed very enthusiastic, what with all the validating noises and the smiling and the orgasms, but in the intervening weeks he’s gotten big into furtive glances. Shane now spends a lot of time boring holes in the side of Ryan’s head with his eyes, and then when Ryan turns to confront him he pretends to be really into that day’s Google doodle.

Ryan’s not precious about sex, and they’ve already done it once. It should be the easiest thing in the world for Ryan to be like, “Hey, remember that time I penetrated you with a variety of sex toys? Let’s do that again some time.”

But every time he thinks about saying it something twinges inside him, deep, that stops him in his tracks. He feels— _on the hook_. Like he has something to lose.

Ryan’s living in his worst nightmare: a PG-rated romantic comedy, the kind that airs on the Hallmark Channel in December. The kind where all the characters learn the true meaning of Christmas but nobody comes.

*

One day Ryan catches Shane looking at pictures of him. This is obviously very embarrassing for Shane, but it’s also embarrassing for Ryan by association and Ryan needs him to cut it out immediately.

“ _Dude_.”

Shane minimizes the screen. He’d been on Ryan’s Facebook, clicking through the sneak peek of the latest professional photoshoot Ryan had done over the weekend to get a few new promo pics and headshots. He tries to be casual about the minimizing but he utterly fails at it, clicking wildly at his mouse and then attempting to use his giant head to block the screen.

“I—what?” he says. “Oh, hey.”

“Oh, _hey_ ,” Ryan mimics back. “Don’t play dumb. I see you Facebook stalking me. What the fuck.”

“Somebody told me they saw a photo of you in a bookstore,” Shane says, casting about for normal reasons why he might be staring at photographs of Ryan in the middle of the workday. “It didn’t sound right, so I had to check. You know, trust but verify.”

“What, Iike I can’t go to bookstores of my own volition?” Ryan says. “Who told you about the shoot?”

“Uh,” Shane says. He casts his eyes around wildly; Ryan can see the panicky wheels turning. “Selorm.”

Ryan turns to look, and sure enough, Selorm’s making her way toward the bay of copiers.

“You just said Selorm because you saw her, man. You looked around and you said the name of the first person you saw.”

“No, we talked this morning in the break room when we were getting coffee, and—”

“Yo, Selorm!” Ryan says. She takes a few steps in their direction and then freezes, obviously picking up on the weird vibes. “Did you talk to Shane this morning about a photoshoot I did?”

Selorm looks back and forth, from Ryan to Shane and then back again. She’s a smart girl and she clearly knows better than to get involved into whatever dumb fucking nonsense this is. “Selorm would very much like to be excluded from this narrative,” she says, backing away in the direction she came.

“You made her quote Taylor Swift, dude,” Ryan says, punching Shane on the arm. “You made her quote Swifty and then _flee_. Women are literally running away from you. Get it together.”

“You get it together,” Shane mumbles. In this particular instance it’s not true, but in general: fair.

*

The next one’s on Ryan, probably. He’s very close to certain that it’s his bad.

But really it’s still Shane’s fault for being sweet, and considerate, and funny, and _ugh_.

Sometimes when they’re filming for Unsolved Shane will draw little post-it note doodles in between takes, just to pass the time. It’s a thing he’s always done, and their set is littered with years’ worth of little yellow post-its with dumb drawings on them now.

They’re filming the on-set scenes for an upcoming Supernatural episode they’ll be shooting on location at Yuma Territorial Prison in Arizona next week. They’ve just joked their way through a bit about a lady outlaw who murdered her unfaithful partner, and Shane’s doodling away while TJ checks a few settings on the camera to deal with the changing light.

A few moments later, Shane pulls the post-it from the pad and sticks it to Ryan’s face.

“The fuck?” Ryan says. He pulls it off. It’s a tiny drawing of two ghosts floating in the air, some cactuses and a big Arizona sun behind them. Between them, crisp little hearts trail in a line up and off the page. The ghosts are wearing cowboy hats. One of them has a tiny lasso.

It’s cute.

“Outlaw ghosts!” Shane says, evidently quite proud of himself. “They’re in love, Ryan.”

“Yeah, except he cheated on her and then she ripped his heart out and shoved it in his face,” Ryan says. “Allegedly. Like when your dog poops in the house and you have to put its face right up next to the poop and be like, _no, bad dog_! Honestly, Shane, sometimes I feel like you’re not really listening when I tell you these stories.”

Shane frowns. “Still. Maybe they patched things up.”

“Not sure getting your nose rubbed in your own internal organs is the kind of thing you bounce back from,” Ryan wheezes. “Pretty sure that’s a ‘dump ‘em and don’t look back’ situation.” 

“Whatever,” Shane says. “ _These_ outlaw ghosts are in love. Look at the hearts, Ryan!”

Shane mimes throwing a lasso and catching Ryan with it, which is a bit so cute he should probably have waited until the cameras were rolling again to do it.

“I see the hearts.”

Ryan puts the post-it down on the desk. They’ve still got some filming to do, but he finds himself glancing at the post-it a lot. The cute ghosts stare up at him with their dumb soft smiley ghost faces. The hearts seem to be wiggling at him.

The kicker, though, is that at the end of the day he doesn’t leave the post-it on the desk, or flick it to the side with piles of others. Instead Ryan waits until nobody’s looking and he _puts the post-it in his pocket_.

And then later, at home, he looks at it and smiles and sticks it on his bedside table.

Disgusting.

*

At the November “Death Becomes Us” event a fan gives them both custom-printed hats as gifts. Ryan gets a snapback that says “I’d Rather be Hunting Ghouls,” and Shane gets a beanie that says “I’d Rather be Playing Red Dead Redemption 2.”

“Look, Ryan!” Shane says. “The fans know I’m a cowboy now.”

“Yeah, of course they do, you haven’t talked about anything but that game for weeks. Cowboys don’t wear beanies, though, they wear cowboy hats. That’s, like, half their entire deal.”

“This one does,” Shane says, narrowing his eyes. “Don’t come for my hat choices, _pardner_. Not when you look like if Ash Ketchum grew up to be a fuckboy.”

Ryan adjusts his snapback. “You’re just jealous of my success in hats. It’s part of the Bergara brand now.”

“We all know you only wear them so much because you’re too lazy to wash your hair,” Shane says, rolling his eyes.

“Excuse you, it’s also because I have a weird hairline.”

“And a big old doink of a forehead,” Shane adds.

“And a big old doink of a forehead,” Ryan agrees. “Be honest, you prefer beanies because they’re the only hats that will reliably stretch enough to fit over your massive head.”

Ryan wears the hat to work the first day back at the office, and not _just_ because he’s too lazy to wash his hair (although that’s also the case). He’s at work for all of five minutes before Shane snatches it off Ryan’s head and plunks it on his own.

“Hey!” he yelps, swinging an arm up, but it’s too late: the hat’s already on Shane’s head. “That’s mine.”

“Dunno, Ryan,” Shane says with a slow smile, and then he switches to his marble-mouthed cowboy drawl. “You’re not wearin’ it, are you, friend-o? Possession is nine-tenths of the law. I don’t make the Wild West rules, I just live by ‘em.”

“It says ‘I’d Rather Be Hunting Ghouls’ on it,” Ryan points out.

“What’s your point?”

“That you _wouldn’t_ rather be hunting ghouls.”

Shane makes an equivocating sort of “eh” gesture with his hand.

“That’s why it’s funny. It’s ironic and I’m keeping it.”

“You’re going to stretch it out!”

Ryan stands up to reach for the hat, but Shane angles his head away. He is infuriatingly tall. Ryan makes a few swipes for it, but he can’t get his hand on the brim.

Ryan’s distracted by Shane in his hat all damn day. It just looks so stupid on him. Stupid and ill-fitting and casual and sloppy and perfect and great. Fuck.

Ryan’s reminded forcibly of the time his middle school girlfriend poached his favorite hoodie and wore it around school like a badge of honor. Shane’s got an identical smirk on his face, like he’s really proud of himself, like everybody can look at him and know he’s earned the right to steal Ryan’s stuff and wear it without asking.

He has earned it, Ryan thinks. Boy howdy, did he earn it. But they’re not talking about that.

It occurs to Ryan that the hat-thievery could be a sublimated desire sort of thing. Maybe, just maybe, Shane’s not stealing Ryan’s stuff just to push Ryan’s buttons. Maybe he’s getting into Ryan’s hat because he secretly wishes he could be getting into Ryan’s pants instead.

Ryan tests the theory by wearing a soft, oversized Lakers hoodie to work a few days later. He pretends to get hot at lunchtime, takes the hoodie off, and then he drapes it over the back of his chair. Ryan makes an excuse to leave his desk—and the hoodie—unattended for a while.

Sure enough, when he comes back, Shane’s wearing the hoodie.

“Aha!” Ryan says. _Caught in the act_. He points an accusatory finger at Shane, at Shane in _his hoodie_.

“What?” Shane says. “I got cold, man. It’s not a thing. Don’t make this a—don’t make this a thing.”

“You never just get cold,” Ryan points out. “This is some middle school bullshit. I don’t know how you look yourself in the face in the mirror in the morning, you, you _sex thief_.”

Shane visibly blanches at the word. Then he blinks owlishly over at Ryan from behind his dumb attractive glasses that make him look like a sexy professor.

“Harsh. Is that a person who steals sex, or…? Because I think there are already words for that. Like, bad ones.”

He looks magnificent in the purple and gold, of course. Like a radiant fucking sunset. The worst part is that because Ryan knows how cozy that hoodie is, he also knows exactly what it would be like to curl up with Shane while he’s wearing it and just be engulfed by soft warmth. That is an annoying thing to know.

“It’s a person who steals inconsequential things, but whose petty thievery is motivated by lust,” Ryan hisses.

Shane looks around the office, alarmed, but nobody’s paying attention to them.

“That’s a lie. I’m. I was cold, Ryan.”

“No,” Ryan says. He knows he’s right. “You’ve got to stop this. Grow up and use your words.”

“I was _cold_!”

“You’re from _Illinois_!”

*

Ryan’s a filthy hypocrite, and he never claimed to be anything else.

He starts listening to a lot of sappy bullshit music. He can’t say for _sure_ that it’s connected to the whole Shane situation, but Ryan’s a realist and a pessimist and he knows, deep down in his heart, that it is.

Usually Ryan’s got pretty dope taste in jams, if he may say so himself. A lot of hip hop, R&B, trap, EDM, top 40 stuff. Anything heavy on beats and light on emotional vulnerability, more or less, with some old-school hits thrown in for flavor and the Disney angle there to cover him on the feelings front.

It all takes a dramatic turn in November. His tastes start to shift. He doesn’t even realize how bad it’s gotten until he’s sitting at his computer, working on a script for the next season of True Crime, and he suddenly realizes he’s writing about a grisly triple-homicide to “Iris” by noted ‘90s alt-rock crooners The Goo Goo Dolls.

“Augh,” Ryan says, pushing back from his desk in shock.

Through half-closed eyes, afraid of what he’ll see, he clicks on his Spotify’s recently played list. Savage Garden. Bryan Adams. _The Cranberries_. It’s just moony adult contemporary hits all the way down.

He must look really upset, because Shane glances over.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s all fine. This case is just super gory. Don’t look at me.”

“Mm. That’s definitely how people sound when they’re fine,” Shane says, looking closer. Ryan flails around with his mouse to close his Spotify window, but in his flailing he gets tangled up in his headphone’s cord and yanks it right out of the monitor.

“AND I DON’T WANT THE WORLD TO SEE ME!” the Goo Goo Doll howls, loud enough to attract the attention of the entire floor, “’CAUSE I DON’T THINK THAT THEY’D UNDERSTAND!”

“Fuck, sorry!” Ryan yelps, bashing ineffectually at his space bar to pause the song. Coworkers are staring now, no doubt wondering what sad bastard’s listening to this in the year 2018.

“Is that the song from City of Angels?” Kate asks, as if she doesn’t already know. “When angel Nic Cage goes to Meg Ryan’s cabin and he’s dripping wet from the rain, and he’s like, oh, I became mortal for you, and then they bone?”

“No,” Ryan lies.

Shane’s eyebrows go up. Ryan’s sweating and cramming his headphone jack back into the computer and Shane just sits there and watches him.

“What won’t the world understand, Ryan?” he asks mildly.

“The Hot Daga,” Ryan snaps. “It’s incomprehensible.”

And that’s not even the worst of it.

The worst of it comes a few days later when Ryan’s sitting on a couch in the break room, laptop on his lap, headphones in his ears, staring into space. It’s become something of a habit now. He likes it because if he sits right on the far end of the couch and angles his body just so, he can watch Shane typing away at his desk from a distance through the open door.

Is it creepy? Probably, but it’s the only way he gets any work done at all these days: with his back to a wall, and Shane in his line of sight—but not so close that Ryan can smell his shampoo. Not so close that Ryan might be tempted to launch himself at Shane at any moment and kiss him all over his gigantic face.

It’s just his bad luck that Curly happens to come in for a refill of coffee right when he’s in full-on creep mode. He’s so caught up in his staring that he doesn’t even notice Curly’s in the room with him until it’s far too late.

He finally realizes when Curly hovers off his left shoulder, squats down to Ryan’s level, and follows his gaze out the door and to its terminus.

“Oh, honey,” Curly says, reaching the logical conclusion. His eyes, when Ryan meets them, are sympathetic.

“I was just—”

“I know,” Curly says, patting his arm. He plucks one of Ryan’s headphones out of his ear and sticks it in his own. He listens to several bars of Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” nodding his head to what could generously be called the beat but might more accurately be considered an overdramatic caterwaul of misery. Then he tugs the headphone back out like he’s heard enough.

“I’m—it’s. Everything is fine.”

“Shh,” Curly says, massaging his bicep. “Just tell him how you feel already. And then he can tell you how _he_ feels, and you can have crazy desperate sex all over this office. Telling me about it can be your Christmas present to me.”

“We already did that,” Ryan says, frowning. He knows this violates all the rules of whatever stupid stand-off he and Shane are locked in, but he can’t keep it to himself a moment longer. He’s starting to doubt that it even happened at all. What if he dreamed the whole thing? What if he’s had a nervous breakdown and this entire mess is only happening inside his head?

“You told him how you feel?”

“No. God, no. Jesus. Gross. No, we had pretty radical sex, like, I don’t know, two months ago now? And I thought there were clear indicators that it would happen again, but it didn’t, and we haven’t even talked about it, and I can’t be the one to hang up first.”

Curly sort of— _cackles_. He rubs his hands together, as if juicy workplace gossip is the crackling fire that sustains him through the winter.

“How did that happen?”

“I’ve got this drawer,” Ryan says, resigned. “With…sex stuff in it. And he found the drawer, and he had questions about the contents, so I answered them. It was hands-on learning. Merry Christmas.”

“So you took him to Poundtown. Pa-rum-pa-pum-pum.” Curly leans in and beats the rhythm to “The Little Drummer Boy” out on his arm, bonding with Ryan over their newfound shared interest.

“Like. _Ish_. A trip was taken to Poundtown,” Ryan says, strategically employing the passive voice. “And now all this is happening to me.” He gestures around, encompassing the room and the open door and Shane sitting out in the office minding his own business and Ryan’s own weak, stupid heart.

“I’ve never felt this specific combination of disgusted and aroused before,” Curly says, shooting another contemptuous look at the wailing coming out of Ryan’s earbuds. “That’s _caliente_ as fuck, but the aftermath,” he flicks a finger up and down in the air, indicating all of Ryan from his sneakers to the tips of his hair, “is tragic.”

Suddenly Ryan’s struck with a genius idea. He cannot ask Shane what he’s thinking, obviously, because that would be a forfeit. But he can send an emissary into the breach.

“You have to help me,” he says to Curly. “I need you to find out if Shane likes me.”

“What, you want me to pass him a note?”

“No, just go talk to him.”

“Oh, like we three-way call him and you stay really silent on the other end and I get him to admit he’s got a crush on you and then we hang up giggling?” Curly asks. “ _Interesting_.”

“No!” Ryan hisses. “Like you mention how great I am or how devastatingly attractive you find me and then you see what he says and report back.”

Curly thinks about this for a moment.

“I’ll do it, but only because I’ve invested in your porny Dawson’s Creek nightmare now. Buck up, I’m sure he’ll be feeling you up under the bleachers and staring deep into your eyes any day now.”

Ryan goes beet red. It doesn’t even occur to him that it might be strange that he can unblushingly penetrate Shane with a variety of toys, but that he cannot unblushingly entertain the idea of doing it a second time _with eye contact._

*

A few hours later:

 **Curly** : i think he probs does want to get dicked down but he just told me to fuck off.

 **Ryan** : what did you say to him??? were you subtle?

 **Curly** : ryry. baby. of course i wasn’t.

*

Ryan’s in the Unsolved shooting set for a full two minutes before he notices Matty leaning against the mannequin like a mustachioed hipster goblin.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he curses, when he notices. Matty’s smile under the handlebar ‘stache is a menacing glint in the half-dark. “What are you even doing in here? We aren’t scheduled to shoot in here until this afternoon.

“I come in here sometimes,” Matty says, like that’s a normal thing to do or admit to doing. “It’s quiet.”

“Oh, you just come in here and lean against shit in the dark, alone?”

Matty’s wearing an ironic polo shirt and he’s got like three gold chains around his neck, and at least as many rings on his fingers. He looks like a sleazy ‘70s porn star. Ryan doesn’t care for it and also resents the fact that Matty pulls it off.

“Mark never did this,” Ryan grumbles, mostly to himself.

“Mark sat in the back and crocheted,” Matty points out. “Like that wasn’t weird?”

The problem with Matty is that he cannot be _trusted_. He’s like a child or a very old person; you never know what he’s going to do or what he’ll open his mouth and say, just because he well and truly doesn’t give a fuck how he comes off to other people. Ryan is the exact opposite of Matty. He cares enormously how he comes off to other people, and so he considers Matty’s studied and deliberate unpredictability suspect at best.

“Okay, well,” Ryan says, starting to back out of the room, “I’m just gonna…go. See you for filming in a while, I guess.”

“Wait, don’t, um,” Matty says. “Hm.”

“What?”

“So you know Shane Madej, our mutual coworker and friend?” Matty grimaces as he says it, like he’s just stepped in something foul.

“What, like, in the biblical sense?”

Matty’s lip twitches, and that’s when Ryan realizes that Shane has responded to Curly’s onslaught of unsubtle probing questions by sending an emissary of his own. It’s all so painfully high school homeroom that he has to sit down.

“Well, he’s. He’s a pretty funny guy, don’t you think?”

“Funny looking, maybe,” Ryan says, squinting at Matty. Matty just squints back, unphased, as Ryan knew he would be.

“I actually find him rather handsome,” Matty says. “In a—” and then he looks down at the palm of his hand with a heavy sigh—"’Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ kind of way. Don’t you think so?”  

“What a weirdly specific reference. Is that—did he make you write that on your _hand_?”

“No,” Matty says, shoving his hand in his pocket.

“Tell Jimmy Stewart that if he wants me to go to prom with him he can ask me himself,” Ryan says. “And by prom I mean my not-so-secret sex toy drawer that apparently everybody just knows about now, which is fine.”

“Your what now?” Matty asks, perking up. It’s the first time he’s looked at Ryan with interest, certainly in this conversation but also possibly ever.

It occurs to Ryan too late that perhaps Shane left the details hazy on purpose to protect their privacy, an option he didn’t really have with Curly because _Curly_.

“Uh,” Ryan stalls, trying to come up with something convincing that sounds like “sex toy,” but all he’s coming up with are nonsense rhymes: La Croix, bok choy, and, for some reason, hoi polloi. He’s never been good at this part, the thinking-on-his-feet part. This is the place where Shane would jump in with an expert save, if he were here. If they were on the same team.

Finally he just gives up and shrugs. It’s not like this will be the weirdest thing that happens to Matty today.

“You think you know a person,” Matty says, shaking his head. “Well, this just slid right on into the realm of not my business, so I’m gonna—” he hooks his thumb toward the door.

“It’s not like it was going to come up on your podcast,” Ryan says. “But yes, I think that would be for the best.” If anybody’s going to lurk up here in the dark, on his own set, it’s damn well going to be him.

Ryan’s not accustomed to having to guess what Shane’s thinking. He knows Shane so well by now, has gotten so used to him, that more often than not he can tell what’s going on in the guy’s head with an exchanged glance or the twitch of Shane’s mouth or the lift of an eyebrow. He’s not used to having to wade through layers on layers of bullshit and go-betweens and awkwardness.

And he doesn’t know what’s wrong with _him_. Ryan had approached casual sex with Shane, well, _casually_. With, he thinks, grace and aplomb and just the right amount of enthusiasm. He can’t figure out why it was so easy for him to invite Shane into his bed once and yet it’s proving impossible for him to open his mouth and do it again.

Except that’s a lie: he does know why. He knows exactly why.

*

Ryan comes in to work on November 26, the morning of his birthday, and there’s a plant sitting in a pot on his desk.

It’s not a small plant, either. It’s a big plant with massive green leaves and big white blooms that takes up the whole desk and obscures his computer. His keyboard and mouse have been cavalierly pushed aside.

It’s nice enough, Ryan supposes, except that he’s never expressed any particular interest in plants. There’s also no note, so he doesn’t even know who it’s from. He stands there for a bit, because there’s really no room for him to sit down and yet it seems impolite to move the plant before acknowledging its existence out loud to somebody.

Shane comes up behind him without warning and claps a big hand on his shoulder. Ryan jumps about a foot in the air.

“Happy birthday, buddy! Got you a peace lily. Like from Hot Fuzz.”

Ryan looks again at the plant, and again at Shane, who situates himself at his own desk and takes a sip of coffee.

“Why?” he blurts out. Shane blinks at him.

“Because it’s your birthday. That’s…that’s why I started with happy birthday, Ryan. That’s how we acknowledge the day of a friend’s birth in polite society.”

Ryan had followed along that far. What he meant was: why a plant?

Ryan can feel his brain immediately spinning into hyperdrive to over-analyze the peace lily. Is this Shane waving the white flag of surrender, declaring Ryan the winner of their little—whatever this is? Or is it symbolic, somehow, of their friendship-turned-something-more?

The Hot Fuzz reference, was that on purpose? Those guys were just good buddies, so maybe this is Shane’s way of telling Ryan he just wants to be friends. Although Ryan did read in an AMA with Edgar Wright that Nick Frost’s character was originally going to be a female love interest, so maybe—

Or is it, oh god. Is it a _test_? Ryan wonders if this is Shane trying to see whether Ryan can successfully keep a living thing alive, and whether the outcome of that experiment will somehow determine if Shane can imagine some kind of romantic future with him or not. The sad truth is that Ryan has not, to this point, been able to successfully demonstrate his ability to keep a living thing alive. There’s a reason he doesn’t have any pets of his own, which is that he works sixty-hour weeks and travels a lot and can barely feed _himself_.

He wonders how much money a peace lily costs. He wonders if he’s going to get caught in a cycle of accidentally killing the peace lily and then having to buy a new one so Shane won’t know he’s killed their symbolic love plant, over and over again. Ryan always suspected his mother of doing that with his goldfish when he was younger, just slipping new identical ones into the tank every time Ryan accidentally fucked up, and now he gets it.

It’s a lot of pressure, for something that’s ostensibly a present. It’s a _commitment_.

Eventually Ryan becomes cognizant of the fact that he’s been silently spiraling for a really long time, staring in wide-eyed alarm at the plant on his desk and not saying anything. Shane’s been watching him the whole time, head cocked to the right, blowing at the coffee in his hand to cool it.

“Thanks,” Ryan says, internally cursing how it comes out squeaky. “I love it?”

“That was good,” Shane says with a little frown, putting his mug down. “Convincing. I especially liked the part where it took you two full minutes to come up with it. Listen, if you don’t—if you don’t want it I can take it back. I just thought your apartment was a little, I don’t know, sterile.”

“You think my apartment is sterile,” Ryan repeats.

That can’t be a good sign, can it? _Sterile_ doesn’t exactly have sexy connotations. Sterile is the opposite of sexy. It’s doctors’ offices and TV shows with shitty jokes and no chemistry and men who shoot blanks.

“I mean, not. It’s not bad. It’s just a little college frat bro, right? Plants are a thing adults have, and you’re a year older, so it seemed appropriate.”

God, does Shane think Ryan’s not mature enough? Is that what this is about? Yeah, Ryan’s got some unframed movie posters up in his apartment. Yes, it’s true that he mostly just eats pasta and Chipotle and things that can be microwaved. Okay, he made them sing Disney songs in the shower. But he’s not a _kid_.

“I read that peace lilies help purify the air, which is nice,” Shane continues. “And it’s—it’s pretty, right?”

Now Shane is frowning uncertainly at the plant too, which isn’t what Ryan intended at all. Ryan needs at least one of them to be calm at any given moment, and he thought he’d called dibs on panicking over nothing just now.

“It’s beautiful, man,” Ryan says, trying to pull himself back from the brink enough to save this. He reaches out to pet one of the big leaves, and it’s silky and strong and alive-feeling under his fingers. “I love her.”

“Her?” Shane asks, but his lips twitch up into a smile and the crease on his forehead smooths out, to be replaced by the familiar crinkles at the corners of his eyes that make Ryan’s stomach churn happily. “I think it’s just cars and boats that are gendered. Anything vehicular, really, which is kind of eesh when you think about it.”

“Nah,” Ryan says. “That’s a lady plant. A feisty one, I hope, if she’s gonna make it in the Bergara household, where we eat the weak. Her name’s Ripley.”

“Oh, _very_ good. That’s the least peaceful name anyone has ever given a peace lily,” Shane says, recognizing the reference, as Ryan knew he would.

She is, Ryan thinks as he moves her to the floor so he can work, a very pretty plant.

*

Two weeks later Ripley the peace lily is still alive and thriving, which comes as something of a shock to Ryan. It turns out she doesn’t have that many needs; just a little sunlight, a consistent temperature, and to be watered a couple of times a week when her leaves start to droop.

Ryan’s starting to feel affectionate toward the plant. Sometimes he tells her to have a nice day when he leaves for work. At least once he tells her to _be good_ , like he used to with Micki and Dori when he’d leave them uncrated for a few minutes to run to the store, and then he boggles at himself because she’s a _plant_.

He does some research online and discovers that, while all peace lilies bloom in the spring, only some select few peace lilies bloom an additional time in the autumn. That means that Ripley must be, as he suspected, a special and extraordinary peace lily. The best of the best.

It’s possible Ryan’s become very quickly attached to the peace lily because he is in fact attached to Shane.

It’s a problem for him, then, when his parents surprise him and Jake with a family trip to Disney World—the one in Florida, not the one here in California. He’s got the PTO to take the time off and they’re between seasons, but he’s anxious about leaving Ripley alone for a whole week.

He corners Shane in the break room.

“I need your help with Ripley,” Ryan says.

“Don’t tell me you’ve killed her already,” Shane says, his eyebrows raised. _Aha, it_ was _a test!_ “I don’t know any plant doctors.”

“No, she’s perfect,” Ryan says, glowering at the implication. “I need you to stop in and check on her while I’m in Florida. If her leaves go all sad and droopy it means she needs water.”

“I dunno, Ry, that’s a lot of resp—”

“Hey, she’s sort of yours too, in a way, since you helped bring her into this world,” Ryan says. “Consider this visitation rights. Don’t be a deadbeat dad.”

His brain sort of stutters and dies at that, because he wasn’t intending to imply that Ripley was his and Shane’s together, like—like their plant child, or something. He’s pretty sure that’s what he’s gone and done.

“Yeah, okay,” Shane says, letting it slide for once, easing into the bit with a smile. Ryan’s beyond grateful. “But she’s going to have so much fun with me while you’re gone. I’m going to let her have soda and stay up past her bedtime, and when she decides I’m the cool dad you’ll have only yourself to blame.”

“Thanks, man,” Ryan says. And then, almost an afterthought: “But please don’t pour soda on my plant.”

“I won’t,” Shane promises, letting out a little wheeze of a laugh. “Do you have a, like. To get into your place.” He trails off and scratches his nose.

Right, the key. Ryan brought his spare key for this express purpose, but he suddenly feels weird handing it over to Shane. It feels weighty in his hand. _Significant_. It’s not that he’s been thinking about giving Shane a key to his place; that would be weird, they’ve only hooked up the once, it’s not—

It’s just weird.

“Here’s my spare key,” Ryan says, swimming against the sluggishly-churning current of his own neuroses. “Make sure you test the door after you lock it on your way out, sometimes it doesn’t catch all the way.”

“Got it,” Shane says, turning back to his work. Ryan leaves him to it, but when he glances over a few minutes later Shane’s not looking at his computer screen. He’s looking down at the key in his hand, turning it this way and that so the metal catches the light.

*

Five days into Ryan’s Florida trip, Shane texts him a series of photos:

Shane, wearing sunglasses, throwing up a laughably out-of-character shaka next to Ripley in Ryan’s living room. He’s positioned a second pair of sunglasses where Ripley’s face would be if she had a face instead of leaves.

Shane, holding up a two liter of soda up to Ripley’s “mouth” and brandishing two huge pixy stix in his other hand. There’s a pizza box open at the base of the plant.

Shane with the plant next to him on Ryan’s couch. This one’s actually a video, and Shane pans to the TV screen so Ryan can see he’s put Alien on. “Baby’s first rated R movie,” Shane says softly. “I know she’s a little young but I wanted her to meet her namesake.”

Ryan texts back: _ffs shane it’s a school night!_

His stomach does a strange, complicated swoop. Ryan was a fool to think they could just have sex and nothing else would change. He’s been dumb in one of the oldest, most classic ways there is to be dumb: by thinking the rules don’t apply to _them_.

Everything Shane says and does now comes to Ryan filtered through a hazy filter of longing and hope and _maybe_. If he’d known he’d be this irrational about it, he’d have told Shane to put his scrawny ass on Tinder and find someone else to rail him in the first place.

It’s late in Eastern standard time, nearly midnight, and he and Jake are getting ready to go to sleep so they can hit the park bright and early the next morning. Jake comes out of the bathroom wiping his face dry with a towel.

“What’s wrong?” Jake asks. “You’ve got a dumb look on your face.”

“This is just how my face looks,” Ryan says, setting him up with the assist.

“Yeah, ‘cause you’re dumb,” Jake says. Today of all days, his heart beating too fast and feeling two or three sizes too big for his rib cage, Ryan can’t dispute it.

Shane texts back a winky face emoji. A huge, traitorous smile blooms on Ryan’s face without his permission.

“Who’s the girl?” Jake asks, crawling into the other bed. Ryan makes a show of putting his phone away and fluffing his pillows, buying a little time.

“No girl. Just Shane. He’s plant-sitting for me this week.”

“Oh,” says Jake. Ryan can’t make himself look over, but he can hear Jake rustling around and turning over. “Since when do you have plants?”

“Since he got me a plant,” Ryan says.

“ _Oh_.” Jake’s dead quiet for a moment, processing. “Is that, like…?”

Ryan sighs. This just isn’t a conversation he’s ready to have with anyone, let alone his little brother. He can feel himself starting to get upset, which is unacceptable. Ryan hasn’t cried at a Disney property since he was five and he dropped his ice cream cone in Tomorrowland and he’s not about to start again now. This is the happiest place on earth, damn it.

“I don’t know what it’s like,” Ryan says, which has the benefit of being true. “There was a thing, and that was fun, but now it’s a whole…a whole other thing.”

“Okay,” Jake says. He clears his throat. “Well, let me know if you want to, like. Talk about it, or.”

They’ve never been great with this kind of stuff. Ryan’s close to his brother and he loves him, but they don’t have heart-to-hearts in hotel rooms and they don’t deliver or receive big coming out speeches and they don’t talk about anyone’s feelings other than their mother’s.

“I really don’t,” Ryan says, and his brother lets out his breath in a relieved whoosh.

“Mom’s gonna lose it,” Jake says with a snicker.

*

Ryan gets back to a healthy, happy (he assumes) peace lily, and that’s great.

Then he notices his bedroom door’s closed, which is strange. He’s pretty sure he left it open. He lives alone and most doors stay open just as a matter of course, because there’s nobody to need privacy from.

He opens it cautiously in case of an intruder, but there’s no one there.

It’s been a lot of week and Ryan’s feeling pent up, so he makes a beeline for his drawer. It’s still his favorite way to unwind; there’s no problem so insurmountable it can’t become a little more manageable after an orgasm or two. Ryan tries very hard not to blame the drawer for how everything’s gone pear-shaped with Shane. It’s really not the drawer’s fault.

Only he opens the drawer and—not to go all Madeline or anything, but something is not right. Something is _quite wrong_.

Everything’s present and accounted for, but Ryan has a complex organizational system for his sex toys. He is, no pun intended, anal-retentive about storing them and keeping them clean. He knows the instant he starts rifling through the drawer that things are slightly out of place. Not quite as he left them.

Someone’s been in his bedroom. Someone’s been in his drawer.

No, not _someone_. Shane.

Ryan’s dick twitches with interest, but he ignores it. He’s got bigger fish to fry, currently, than jerking off to the idea of Shane snooping through—or maybe even using?—his sex toys, though he’ll return to it later. Namely this: the post-it Shane drew, the two little cowboy ghosts with the hearts, is sitting _right there_ on the bedside table, where Ryan can look at it every morning after he turns off his alarm. Shane can’t have missed it.

Honestly, it feels like relief. Like a stalemate. Shane’s been caught with his pants down, although he doesn’t know it yet, and Ryan’s been caught with his feelings out. Maybe now that they’re both compromised, they can have an honest conversation.

He picks up the phone.

*

Shane answers on the third ring, out of breath. “Sorry, my phone was charging in the other room. Good trip?”

“Oh sure, it was great. Thanks for watering my plant, Goldilocks.”

Shane laughs, uncertain, not getting the reference.

“No problem. I don’t…?”

“Goldilocks, you know? Because I got home and realized someone’s been eating my porridge and sleeping in my bed, so to speak. Did you figure out which was too big, which one was too small, and which one was _just right_?”

Maybe Shane will hang up on him. Ryan’s not accustomed to having the upper hand like this, so much so that he almost doesn’t know what to do with it. It’s only in this one area of their lives where he’s got everything just a little more figured out than Shane does. He’s afraid he’ll go a little mad with the power of it.

“Oh, uh, shit. It must have been a prowler. I thought I checked that the door was locked, but.”

“A prowler broke into my apartment, headed straight for the drawer containing all my sex paraphernalia, went through it, and then left without stealing anything? Just a big old horny prowler? Try again, bud.”

Shane clears his throat, a long, grating noise like something’s caught in it.

“I didn’t use any of them,” he says. “I just. I never got a chance to get a really good look before, and I was nosy. I’m sorry for snooping, that’s really—ugh, creepy. I’m sorry.”

Ryan can practically feel the mortification radiating off Shane through the phone. He shrugs, and then he remembers Shane can’t see the shrug.

“It’s, I mean. It’s okay to be curious, but you could have just asked to look.”

“No, I couldn’t have,” Shane says. He sounds miserable.

“Of course you—you asked me the first time, didn’t you? So what—”

“You didn’t want to!” The words come pouring out of Shane all in a rush, as if someone’s turned him over like a ketchup bottle and smacked him very hard. “I asked and you didn’t want to, to, you know, which is totally fair, so I figured it was better to just let it lie.”

Ryan doesn’t know. It takes him a really long time to put the pieces together, to figure out what Shane can possibly mean by that. Then he has a moment of clarity, courtesy of one of his all-time favorite memories: _you can fuck me if you want_.

 “Oh my god, Shane, you idiot,” Ryan says. “I wanted to fuck you stupid. I wanted to fuck you through the floor. Have you—this whole fucking time…”

The possibility that Shane might have somehow walked away from that night under the impression that Ryan wouldn’t want a repeat performance had never even _occurred_ to him.

Shane’s quiet for a long moment.

“Yeah. I mean, not at the time, I was too worked up. But later I kept thinking about it, and about how you did all that stuff for me and all I did for you was a shitty hand job, and—”

“It wasn’t shitty!” Ryan squawks. “That was a top five hand job, right there. Maybe even top three. That was a Kobe in the ’08 NBA Finals-level hand job.”

Shane laughs weakly. “I don’t know what that means. I’m starting to think I should have just talked to you.”

“You fucking think?”

“Well, I’m not the only one with a mouth, Ryan. You could have brought it up any time and you didn’t.”

“I couldn’t bring it up either!”

“Why not?”

“Because of the post-it!” Ryan blurts out. “And the plant, and the, the feelings. And if we kept doing it and then we _stopped_ doing it I’d be crushed.”

Shane’s quiet for so long that Ryan thinks he really has hung up the phone this time.

“Shane?”

“I’m coming over,” Shane says, finally. “Be there in half an hour.”

*

Ryan spends the next while running around the apartment trying to make it look homier, which is stupid because Shane was literally just in it and so he knows full well it’s an ugly cave with almost no décor and exactly one plant.

Forty minutes later, Shane’s still not there, and Ryan starts to fret. It’s a low-level boil at first: did Shane change his mind and stay home?

Another ten minutes and Ryan’s all the way up to _what if Shane got in a car accident and in his last dying moments he reached over to text me only his phone was broken and now I’ll never get a chance to tell him how I feel?_

At that exact moment he gets a text. He scrambles for it.

 **Shane** : Sorry, traffic sucks :/

Ryan exhales and throws his phone back on the couch. Like, obviously Shane wasn’t dead. Obviously.

Then he has another thought: what if Shane wants a return trip to poundtown? Ryan still smells like airplane. He’s got the cursed stench of LAX all over him.

He darts into the shower and scrubs himself like crazy with the black peppercorn body wash his mother gave him for his birthday in a gentle nudge to _put in more effort_. Once he smells satisfyingly spicy and not like BO and Auntie Anne’s pretzels he’s still got to deal with the hair situation, and that’s another ten minutes gone.

When Ryan finally emerges from the bathroom, Shane’s sitting on his couch, one leg crossed over the other, foot jiggling nervously.

“Sorry, I knocked, but you didn’t…so I let myself in.” Shane holds Ryan’s spare key out for Ryan to take. “Here’s your key back.”

“Thanks,” Ryan says, but he doesn’t move to grab it. Shane settles for putting it down on the coffee table. Ryan sits down on the other end of the couch and then turns to face Shane, his back against the arm, legs tucked up criss-cross applesauce under him.

“I feel old,” Shane says with a sigh, staring down at his hands, picking at his cuticles. He stops himself, but then he immediately cards his fingers through his hair like keeping them moving is powering his speech.

“You’re not old,” Ryan says automatically, even though he’s usually the first one to razz Shane about their five-year age difference.

“Not, like, old for living,” Shane says. “Just old for—I don’t know. You’re so blasé about this stuff. Very matter-of-fact.”

Ryan assumes that Shane means sex, because god knows Ryan could not be considered blasé about much else.

“I’m not blasé about you,” Ryan says. Shane looks up, surprised, and then he shakes his head.

“No, I just mean, like. The youths these days, they’re all _eat my ass_ this and _raw me, daddy_ that, and that’s all sort of overwhelming for someone who emphatically did not learn to have sex that way. I didn’t want to disappoint you or…or bore you with my conventionality.”

They’re just jumping right in, then. Ryan’s never ever heard someone start a conversation with _raw me,_ _daddy_ and he’s not prepared for it. He’s not sure where a conversation can possibly go from there.

He’s pretty sure Shane’s trying to tell him that he finds Ryan intimidating in bed. Ryan’s both flattered and perplexed.

“Shane, please accompany me on a journey to the past, like in Anastasia. Did I seem bored, when we were together?”

Shane thinks for a moment, his eyebrows knitted together nearly into one straight line.

“I don’t know. No. Just hot and sadistic, mostly. I remember a lot of yanking and swearing and begging and lube everywhere.”

“Do you have any idea how satisfying it was to show you things you didn’t know about? I never get to do that. It was, like, a sexual highlight of my life, dude.”

“You teach me stuff all the time,” Shane says.

“Yeah, about _murder_. Sometimes accidentally about sports, if you forget to tune me out. It’s really not the same thing.”

“I guess not.” Shane cracks a smile. Then he shakes his head and shifts his weight on the couch. “Anyway, after the fact I wondered if that was why you didn’t want to fuck me. Because I was too green or awkward or something.”

He’s bright pink, just saying it out loud. Ryan’s transfixed by the way the blush blooms on his cheeks and stains his neck and the tips of his ears. He wants to reach out and touch, to see if Shane’s skin’s as hot as it looks, but he’s also distracted by what has to be the stupidest miscommunication in the history of intercourse.

“Saying ‘you can do this thing if you want’ isn’t the same as saying ‘I want you to do this thing,’” Ryan says. “I wasn’t about to find out you didn’t mean it when I was balls-deep. Or worse, after. But Jesus Christ did I want to.”

Shane goes, if possible, redder. It makes Ryan want to say all kinds of filth just to see how far Shane can be pushed before he snaps. Ryan wonders what that snap would look like. Probably half the world’s population would crumble into dust on the spot, like in Infinity War.

“Oh, see, that’s a translation error,” Shane says. “In Embarrassed Midwesterner dialect, _you can fuck me if you want_ translates almost word-for-word to _if you don’t give me the business this minute I’m going to scream_.”

“I should buy an Illinois-to-California dictionary, then,” Ryan says, flummoxed. “I mean, I did give you _some_ business.”

“That you did,” Shane agrees. He smiles for the first time since he arrived, and Ryan’s nerves ratchet down two or three notches. “I feel weird talking about this in front of Ripley. Young ears, and all.”

They both glance over at the corner of Ryan’s living room, where the peace lily lives.

“I spent so many hours agonizing over what you could possibly have meant by the fuckin’ plant, man,” Ryan admits. Shane’s really put himself out there today and it seems only right that Ryan should meet him halfway, trading an insecurity for an insecurity.  

Shane turns to face him all the way, tucking his own legs up under him, a mirror image of Ryan’s own posture. He gives a tiny wince, barely perceptible and then gone.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Shane says. “I just thought it was nice. Living alone can be lonely. I thought it might make you smile to look at it. At her, sorry.”

It _does_ make Ryan smile to look at. The plant brightens his damn day every time he sees her and thinks about Shane. She makes him feel calm and brave and hopeful.

Ryan lets his anxious thoughts roll around in his head for a few more seconds, and then he opens his mouth to air them out.

“The reason I didn’t try to get you in bed again is that I’ve got a huge fuckin’ crush on you, dude, and it’s been very stressful and humiliating. Please don’t—ugh, please don’t laugh.”

And there it is: the very last thing Ryan can afford to give up. It feels good to fan the entire deck of his crazy out on the table and invite Shane to pick a card, any card.

“Oh no, gooey insides,” Shane says. He’s not laughing, but he’s fighting back a smile and his eyes are bright on Ryan’s. “I’d never laugh at your soft underbelly, Ryan. Perish the thought.”

He reaches out for Ryan’s hand. He turns it over, palm up, and strokes the vulnerable inside of Ryan’s wrist with his thumb.

## *

It’s a little easier, from there.

Ryan grabs them a couple of beers from the fridge, and the leftover pizza that Shane had ordered when he’d checked in on Ripley. His wrist is still tingling. He feels empowered to push his luck.

“So, the drawer snooping,” Ryan says. Shane flushes again. It’s just _so_ attractive; Ryan wants to smash that ‘fluster’ button again and again until Shane’s a quivering mess. It’s a rare treat, because Shane so rarely flusters in their day-to-day lives. He only gets this way for Ryan, and only about this.

“I wasn’t snooping,” Shane says. “I was window-shopping.”

“Aw, you’re like the Little Match Girl,” Ryan says, taking a swig of his beer. “Sitting alone outside in the cold, bereft of sex toys of your own, compelled to stare into the glow of my drawer and rub your giant hands together for warmth.”

“Well. Not entirely bereft,” Shane says shiftily.

And then he literally _shifts_ in his seat.

Shane’s been doing that a lot tonight, actually, now that Ryan thinks about it. A lot of uncomfortable weight redistribution. Ryan assumed he was just nervous, but what if—is he—?

“Wait just a goddamn minute,” he says, pointing an accusatory finger at Shane. “Is there something _inside you_ right now, at this very moment? Be honest.”

Shane’s eyes go up and to the right, momentarily evasive. He takes a long pull of his beer, and Ryan watches his face every second.

“There are a lot of things inside me at _all_ moments, Ryan. Organs. Blood. Like twelve gallons of water. You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Oh my god, there is. _Dude_.”

“After we—after last time, I ordered a set of plugs,” Shane says. “You know, the training ones that get you used to it.”

“Do I know,” Ryan scoffs. “You fucker. I can’t believe you’ve been sitting here staring me in the face and telling me you feel old and out-of-touch while stuffed to the gills.”

“I’m trying to stay hip,” Shane says. He gives another little wiggle.

Ryan’s lightheaded from the speed with which all his blood flow’s been diverted from his brain to his dick. He’s been interested for the duration of the conversation, interested by the flush of Shane’s cheeks and the red of his mouth and the disarray of his hair, but now he’s hard enough to cut glass.

He shifts in his seat too, and Shane watches him do it, knowing.

“Please let me—so, uh. Can I see it?” Ryan asks, and he winces when his voice cracks a little. So much for being the smooth one.

Shane drains his beer.

*

They’re back in Ryan’s bedroom. If this all goes south, Ryan’s going to have to move. His bedroom will have seen too much, and he’ll have seen too much in it.

The minute they’re through the threshold, Ryan leaps on his bed, settling himself with his back against the headboard. Shane stays behind, hovering in the doorway. Ryan is, as ever, torn between making things easier for Shane and making things _so_ much more difficult for him.

He settles for the latter, because the heart wants what the heart wants.

“Okay, well, get naked. It’s going to take you like a week to get all those layers off, so you might as well start now.”

Shane’s hands go to the top button of his button-down, and then he pauses and pulls a face.

“ _Rapido_ , big guy,” Ryan says, snapping his fingers. “I don’t give a shit that you’re not built like Henry Cavill.”

“Don’t you snap your fingers at me,” Shane says reprovingly, starting on the buttons. “I’m getting there. Just—it’s not about _you_ , okay.”

He shucks the button-down and tugs his t-shirt over his head. He actually does look a little different than Ryan remembers; more sinewy, less soft around the middle. A little more like the Shane he first met five years ago, stronger and broader in the shoulders from use.

“Have you been working out?” Ryan asks, surprised.

“I said it wasn’t about you!” Shane says, a little hysterical, the words going high-pitched at the end. He purses his lips together and takes a breath. “I’m getting to the age now where if I don’t exercise my lower back will just spontaneously stop working.”

The working out. The trainer plugs. Ryan crosses his arms over his chest, evaluating the situation.

“Well, you look great,” Ryan says, his breath hitching. “You did before, too. Hey—don’t,” he reaches an arm out; Shane’s about to pull his pants and underwear off in one fell swoop. “Let me _see_. Men are very visual creatures. If you keep doing this you’ll learn that about us.”

Shane’s eyebrows go up.

“Oh, you want a little bit of this action?” he asks, unbuttoning the button of his pants and then pulling the zipper down painfully slowly, pulling the fly apart to show the waistband and a few inches of his underwear. “Some of _this_?”

He strikes a pose that’s meant to be silly, one hand on his hip and one behind his head, but it’s not silly. It’s obvious to Ryan that Shane thinks his body is a _bit_. He’s accustomed to using it for laughs, and tonight it’s important to Ryan that Shane knows he’s not laughing.

All Ryan can see is the twitch of Shane’s hip flexors and the trail of sparse hair under his belly-button and the pinpricked-pink flush of his chest. The hint of a bulge, framed just right by his half-undone pants.

“You don’t have to make it a joke, you know,” Ryan says. He licks his lips and then he has a moment of regret where he feels creepy for having done that, but it’s too late to un-do it. “It’s not, like, funny. I’m into it.”

Shane’s hand falls from behind his head to hang at his side.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, and he starts to peel off his pants. He watches Ryan as he does it, and Ryan watches him right back.

Then Shane’s standing there, all five miles of him, in only his boxer briefs. He runs his hands over his hips self-consciously and reaches down to give the conspicuous bulge a squeeze.

“ _Dude_ ,” Ryan breathes out. His blood’s pounding so hard it’s like he can feel his brain throwing itself against the inside of his skull as he looks at Shane’s big hand cupped around himself.

Shane squares his shoulders but his smile is shy, and that’s new. Ryan hopes he’ll remember that expression always, the fluster merging with bashfulness and pride and arousal and falling into such a specific set of soft eyes and nervous mouth.

He wants to reach out with grabby hands like a kid, but instead he very maturely gestures at Shane with a jerk of his chin.

Shane gathers himself onto the bed, a gangle of long limbs, and Ryan reaches out to pull him in. He gets his hands around the joints of Shane’s bare shoulders again, finally, after months of staring at the clothed hunch of them and remembering and _wondering_. His fingers jump from mole to mole along Shane’s upper back, connecting them like constellations, and Shane shudders under his hands.

“I should get those looked at,” Shane mutters.

“Shut up, Shane,” Ryan says, letting his hand skim down to pinch Shane’s side. He’s had about enough of Shane’s disparaging comments—about his age, his body, his newness to this act or that toy or whatever. He’s ready to make Shane forget all that bullshit, at least for a while. “Turn around. Pull the panties down real slow for me.”

“ _Panties_ —Ryan,” Shane says, aghast. He’s laughing and shaking his head as he turns and rocks forward on his elbows, but he still does it.

When Ryan sees him stretched around the plug, closed tight around the black base of it, he almost has a heart attack himself.

*

He tries to refocus, to put himself back into the teacher role here. The first time they did this, Ryan was all about making it good for Shane, and it helped him keep his head on straight. If he can access that part of himself again, the part that’s definitely into it but also a little removed, he’ll be fine and he won’t come in his pants before Shane’s even touched him.

He’s having a little trouble staying removed, at present.

Part of it is that Shane’s got more direction of his own, now. He’s working the plug out of himself, letting Ryan watch but not touch. Ryan didn’t even have to tell him to do it; he just went for it, leaning forward onto his elbows and turning the plug at the base.

Now he’s got it almost all the way out. He’s making the most ridiculous huffing sounds right into the forearm that’s bracing him up on the bed, and Ryan can’t take it anymore. He reaches out to grab the plug at its base, working it free and watching Shane’s hole clench around nothing. He presses it back in and eases it out a few more times for good measure.

“Do you wear this a lot?” Ryan asks. It’s clearly not the smallest size plug in the set, although likely not the largest either. “Hang on, do you wear it to _work_?”

“Once or—oh, fuck—twice, yeah. Just to…just to see.”

Ryan gets a sudden vision of Shane sitting at his desk wearing Ryan’s oversized purple and yellow Lakers hoodie. Wearing Ryan’s _hat_. Wearing his hat and maybe, secretly, a fucking butt plug.

He must let out a whine, because Shane laughs at him. “Doin’ okay back there, bud?”

“I’m coping,” Ryan says. “There’s a lot happening right now and you know I’m not the world’s best multi-tasker. Did you—was there something specific in the drawer you wanted to try?” 

Shane flops onto his belly to give the drawer another look over. On the way he catches sight of the post-it staring up at them from the bedside table. He traces one of the little ghosts with his fingertip.

Ryan’s coping. He’s _coping_.

Shane opens the drawer and rifles through it. “I can’t believe you knew I’d been in here. I was so careful.” 

“A man knows when someone’s gone through his sex drawer, Shane. He just knows. Curiosity leaves traces behind, and if you were a cat you’d have breezed through like five of your lives on this drawer alone.”

Shane comes back up with a C-shaped prostate massager, a relatively new addition to Ryan’s collection. A bold choice.

“I confess I couldn’t really figure out what this guy’s situation is,” Shane says, handing it to Ryan.

“This end goes in you,” Ryan says, tapping the sizeable and very firm bulb at the top end of the C. “It’s for nailin’ the prostate over and over until you start speaking in tongues. It curves down and hugs the ‘ol grundle, and—”

He turns the bullet vibe at the base on and sets it against the tip of Shane’s nose. Shane’s eyes go very wide and start to cross as he stares down his nose at it.

“Strong,” he says. “Seems like a weird shape.”

“It’s a massager. You sit on it and rock,” Ryan says. “Do you—do you want to try?”

It’s obvious that Shane wants to try. It’s probably equally obvious that Ryan wants to watch Shane try, so at least neither of them have any pride whatsoever left to hold them back.

He gets Shane situated against the pillows, reclining at about a 45-degree angle. He could let Shane have a go with the toy himself, but it is a little difficult to figure out and selfishly Ryan wants to be the one to do it.

The toy’s not big, exactly. Compared to the beads it goes in relatively easy, with the help of a lot of lube, although it’s bigger than the plug. Once it’s in he nestles it up close against Shane’s perineum, the end just under his balls.

Shane’s making the weirdest faces, wriggling around a little like he’s trying to get away from it. Ryan knows what he’s feeling: the unforgiving hardness of the end that’s inside him, blunt and surprising when you’ve never felt sustained pressure there before.

He could give some direction, but honestly the wriggling’s the best thing Shane can do for himself. If he’s like Ryan, he’ll wriggle his way into figuring it out and never look back.

Shane goes to wrap his hand around his dick, but Ryan catches his wrist.

“Nuh-uh. Just rock.”

Ryan takes the opportunity to get undressed himself, down to his underwear. He can feel Shane’s eyes on him, so he’s a little showier than usual, flexing the muscles of his back and ass as he turns to toss his shirt in the hamper.

“Unbelievable,” Shane says. “I can’t believe what a show-off you are. The Greatest Showman is actually a biographical tale of Ryan Stev—” His words trail off into a grunt of surprise as his dick suddenly twitches back to full hardness, like Ryan pulled a lever or something.

Ryan watches him a little closer. Shane’s getting the hang of it now; his movement is less like random uncomfortable wriggling, more purposeful. There’s a glint of moisture at the tip of his dick, which means the show is starting.

He can’t decide what he wants more, to watch or to touch. Eventually he settles behind Shane on the bed, his back against the headboard and his chest pressed against Shane’s back, legs spread so Shane’s between them. Shane barely reacts when Ryan slides behind him.

“Do you like it?” Ryan asks, batting Shane’s hand away from his own dick a second time.

“Like isn’t really the word,” Shane says through gritted teeth. He’s sweating.

“This can get intense,” Ryan says. He reaches around to stroke Shane’s stomach, feeling the muscles jump under his hands. “Have you ever had a prostate orgasm before?”

“I don’t—I don’t know,” Shane says. “How do you know?”

“That’s a no, then,” Ryan says. He wraps a light hand around Shane’s dick, the loosest of grips, to encourage Shane to rock up into his hand and back down on the toy. “Believe me, you’d know.”

“I think this might…it might be too much,” Shane says couple of minutes later. He’s all wet, leaking clear fluid at a slow but steady pace, and Ryan can’t stop running his fingers through it, dampening the hair on Shane’s stomach. If they keep this up he’s going to develop a Pavlovian response to laundry, where the act of doing laundry gets him hard just because he associates it with the acts that dirtied the sheets in the first place.

“It’s okay,” Ryan says. “Don’t move so much. Little rocks, or even just use your muscles. Like how chicks do that awesome clenching thing around your dick.” He grips his hand tighter around Shane’s dick to drive his point home, and Shane swears loudly and profusely.

“They’re called kegels. Of course even your pelvic floor is swole,” Shane says, sounding a little mad.

It’s the strangest thing: the last time they did this, Ryan couldn’t prevent himself from being just a little bit of a bully in bed. Just a little bit rough. Not _mean_ exactly, but probably meaner than he ever would have been with a non-Shane person. He’d felt _on_. Like he was performing, rising to the occasion of their usual chemistry in a new context.

Ryan was very cavalier about this the first time around, but he doesn’t feel so cavalier about it now.

He feels tender and stripped-down and bruised. Like he wants to pepper kisses all over every part of Shane’s skin that he can reach. Like he wants to tell Shane what a great job he’s doing, how good he feels under Ryan’s hands. Soppy shit like that.

Ryan can’t quite bring himself to do any of it. What he does instead is reach down to cup Shane’s balls, trailing moisture as he goes, and then below them to turn on the vibrating part of the toy.

It’s what past Ryan would do, after all. The one who still had some chill, rather than the feelings-golem shell of his former self he’s become.

“Hnnngh,” Shane whines, and he rocks back into Ryan’s body and grabs for Ryan’s forearms. His fingers dig into the muscles there, almost hard enough to hurt, but Ryan takes it.

Ryan clutches him close, tucking his nose into the spot where Shane’s neck meets his shoulder and inhaling. He presses a reassuring kiss right on his pulse point, because that’s what feelings-golems do.

“Okay, just let me—” Ryan sets his hand on Shane’s pelvis and pushes down, so the toy can do its work and Shane can’t fight against it. Shane’s whole body immediately starts to tremble, the muscles quaking involuntarily as the toy inside him builds pressure from the inside out.

“Fuckin’, please, can’t I—” Shane goes for his dick a third time, but Ryan grabs his wrist.

“You can come without it,” he says. “Trust me. Just let it happen, you control freak.”

“Trust me, says the man who once suggested to me that the Roanoke settlers might have been victims of a zombie plague,” Shane says, high-pitched and keening.

Shane rocks down a little once, twice—Ryan’s hand is all wet but he doesn’t move it from Shane’s lower belly—and then he’s shuddering and shaking and coming dry and untouched, letting out loud rhythmic whimpers in time with the clenching muscles of his pelvis. Ryan’s never heard Shane make those kinds of noises before; rough, almost inhuman-sounding, entirely beyond his control.

“There you go, babe,” Ryan says, kissing and nipping lightly at the juncture of Shane’s shoulder, not even realizing he’s said it.

Eventually Shane’s muscles stop twitching. He flails for the vibrator, turning it off, and then he tilts his head around to look at Ryan.

“Ryan, the fans were right. I am a demon. Or I _was_ , and that was an exorcism.”

“A sexorcism,” Ryan says. “The Sexorcism of Shane Madej. I’d watch that movie.”

“We basically just _made_ that movie,” Shane says. “How is my dick still hard? What is happening? I can’t feel my toes.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t need toes to fuck,” Ryan says, giving Shane’s dick an unconcerned stroke. “You’ll get feeling back in a while. Your dick’s still hard because you didn’t come, not like that. Rock down again and you’ll see what I mean.”

Shane gives another little rock against the toy and he gasps. “Wizardry!”

“In theory you could go forever, like the fuckin’ energizer bunny. In practice—”

“In practice,” Shane says, “please help me get this thing out of me and then fuck me. I’m, Jesus, Ryan, I’m actually going up the wall here.”

Shane’s a smart guy; he doesn’t make the same mistake twice. There’s no beating around the bush, no  evasive language.

“Really?” Ryan asks. He sits very still, and holds Shane in stillness with him so he can’t be distracted by the press of the toy inside him.

“No, Ryan,” Shane says, sarcastic. “After all this I decided I don’t actually want that dick after all, thanks, so—of course really, you idiot.”

“Yeah, okay,” Ryan says. “But fair warning, I’m going to be really gross.”

“Well, mark me down as scared and horny,” Shane quotes, but he turns around to give Ryan a questioning look anyway.

*

And, as promised, it’s gross. It’s really gross. Ryan’s gross.

They make out for a while, Ryan hovering over Shane, letting their dicks slide together in the slick wetness of Shane’s belly. That’s not the gross part. That comes when Shane goes to roll over, onto his stomach, and Ryan just—stops him.

“I’d rather, uh. Is like this okay?” he asks. He doesn’t say it’s so he can see Shane’s face, kiss his neck, wind his hands around Shane’s bony wrists and tug them up over his head, fuck him deep and stare into his eyes. He just thinks it.

“Of course it is,” Shane says. “You’re running this show, you just put me where you want me. I’m very malleable just now, on account of how I still can’t feel my legs.”

“Just what I’ve always wanted,” Ryan says. “A Shane-sized sex doll.”

“Hey, they’re bustin’ down the doors for the Shane model in eastern Europe. I’m very big there.”

“You’re pretty big here too,” Ryan points out, giving Shane’s dick a deliberate squeeze before attending to the business of the condom and lube.

It was a lot easier to be detached while using _implements_ , is all. The toys are fun, but they’re also a conduit and a barrier and a distraction. Ryan’s nervous about what he’ll do, about the stupid shit he’ll say, when that’s all stripped away.

When it’s just him and Shane, alone. No props, no cameras, no bits. No drawer.

The minute he slides home, inching carefully in even though Shane’s more than warmed up, Shane lets out a deep groan. Ryan knows then that he was right to be worried, and he has to shove his knuckles in his mouth to prevent the babble of endearments that immediately want to spill out.

_Inside you i am inside you right now i want to scream_

“Oh god,” Shane says, shivering and shifting his hips up to meet Ryan. Ryan’s sure he must be sensitive inside, from the toy.

“Alright?” Ryan asks. He brings the pads of his fingers to rest on Shane’s hips, careful not to press down on bone. It’s tough, on Shane, to find places that aren’t bone.

“More than,” Shane says, strangled. “Do the—okay, do the sex thing now, please, Ryan.”

“So eloquent,” Ryan says, and he means it as a sarcastic little dig but it doesn’t come out sarcastic. God damn it, it comes out quiet and affectionate and it makes Shane _look_ at him.

“That I can speak at all is a testament to my fortitude, after everything you’ve put me through today,” Shane says. He gets tired of waiting for Ryan to move, then, and he starts moving his hips under him, slowly fucking himself on Ryan from below.

Part of Ryan wants to stay still and see how long Shane will keep it up, but a much bigger part of him wants to give in. He wants to stop fighting it and just _hang up the phone_.

That’s what he does. He arranges Shane’s limbs to the best of his ability, says a little prayer for luck, and allows himself be his full embarrassing, disgusting, post-it-saving, Goo Goo Dolls-listening, plant co-parenting self.

Probably Shane was expecting it hard and rough and fast. That’s kind of Ryan’s MO for life, in general; he goes hard and sometimes he speaks without thinking and accidentally leaves people cut off short in his wake. He tries to calibrate, tries to rein it in, but he can be abrupt and goal-oriented. He knows he can.

Not so now. Now, long, slow strokes. Now, bending down to kiss Shane as deeply and thoroughly as he wants, until Shane’s breathless and panting under him. Now, with his hands at Shane’s neck, at his upper arms, threaded in his hair, touching everything he wants to touch as carefully as he pleases.

It’s been a long time since Ryan had sex like this. He broke up with his last serious girlfriend well over a year ago, and since then he’s been doing the casual sex thing and living that drawer life and having a great time with both. He’d forgotten how different it could be, when the fucking was about connection first and sensation second. Not always better; just more. Overwhelming, terrifying amounts of _more_.

This isn’t casual sex. This isn’t friends-with-benefits sex. He’d known that it wouldn’t be.

“Ryan…” Shane says, low and warning, when Ryan finally gets around to touching his dick. They stopped bantering a while ago, stopped talking altogether when none of the words seemed quite right, so hearing his voice again has a grounding effect.

“Shane, babe, are you—are you gonna come for me?” he asks, jerking Shane off hard and fast. “Come on, baby.”

“Oh my _god_ ,” Shane says again. He comes all over himself, all over Ryan’s hand, like he was just waiting for a formal invitation. When he opens his eyes to look at Ryan they’re hazy brown and lovely, crinkled at the corners from smiling.

Shane reaches up to put a hand on Ryan’s cheek. His hand’s so big it spans most of Ryan’s cheek and jaw, and Ryan bites down gently on the meat of Shane’s palm, under his thumb.

“Yeah,” Ryan breathes, and then he can’t hold out any longer either. “Fuck, oh, oh—”

Shane _clenches_ around him, on purpose, and then grins lazily up at him, and Ryan’s never seen anything so great. He presses a kiss to Shane’s palm, quick and chaste, and comes as deep as he can.

There’s a huge rush of endorphins and joy and satisfaction—and after that, as he pulls out, a secondary wave of embarrassment. But there’s a condom to be disposed of and clean-up to do, and it can wait.

*

“So,” Shane says later, when they’re on the couch watching Netflix and finishing the pizza. “Babe, huh?”

“No,” Ryan says, but he can feel himself going red. “What? No.”

“You said it twice, though,” says Shane, holding up two long fingers. “Two times. And then ‘baby,’ and not in a sarcastic way either. In like. In, like, a _oh_ _baby_ way.”

“A lot of people were saying stuff,” Ryan mutters nonsensically.

“And I was expecting you to pull some weird shit, the way you were talking, but—hmm. _Oh_. Oh, Ryan.”

Ryan sighs, rolling his eyes. He picks at the label of his beer bottle, tearing little wet pieces off in strips. Shane puts his own beer down and leans in, and yeah, this was probably inevitable.

“Ryan, when you said you were going to get gross, did you mean…did you mean _romantic_? Because I definitely thought you were gonna try to suck come out of my ass through a straw or something, and instead you just whispered sweet nothings and kissed me a lot.”

“I might still do that,” Ryan threatens, hoping for a distraction. “The straw thing.”

“They’re so bad for the environment, though, straws.”  

Shane drops it for a little while and turns back to his pizza. They make it through a full twenty minutes of the Coen brothers’ new cowboy anthology movie before Shane pauses it and turns to him once more.

“Okay, you know it’s chill to have feelings when you have sex, right? I’m not repulsed by your feelings. I’m mystified that you can nonchalantly walk me through a _new kind of orgasm_ and then freak out about a pet name, but I’m not—it isn’t gross, Ryan. It’s nice.”

“I spent a really long time very deliberately not being into you, man,” Ryan says. There’s no more label left on his beer bottle. It’s in bits all over the coffee table and the couch and his floor. “You just weren’t an option, so it wasn’t that hard. But now you’re sitting here, looking very—very _fucked_ , and saying things, and.”

“I’m an option now,” says Shane. “So, you know, consider me.”

“ _Consider_ you? That’s the stupidest—”

“Sorry. Consider me, darling. Is that better?”

“No, that’s not better!

“Sweetheart.” Shane leans in. Ryan made a serious miscalculation, letting Shane hit his stride like this. He knows better, usually, but it’s been a long day and he’s very recently come his brains out. “Sugar-lips. My little pear-blossom.”

“Shut up, Shane.”

“ _My_ _precious_ …no, wait, that’s no good.”

“Slow your roll, Gollum,” Ryan says, laughing in spite of himself. Shane has a way of doing this, of exposing his neuroses to the bright light of day and prodding at them with his gentle sense of humor until it’s obvious that at least some of them are nonsense.

“I’m just saying, I think we should do the whole shebang,” Shane says. “Yeah, absolutely, the boning. More of the boning. Raw me, daddy, etcetera etcetera. But maybe a _soupçon_ of feelings too. A scintilla of babe-ing.”

“A _soupçon_ ,” Ryan repeats, dubious.

“Yeah, it means a little bit,” Shane says, mistaking his tone for confusion. “Ironically, from the Latin suspīciō, which means ‘suspicion.’ A suspicion of feelings. Doesn’t that feel right?”

“You mean to tell me the man who cannot think of a single word in German other than _mustard_ , despite having spent four years studying German, knows the Latin root of _soupçon_?”

Shane shrugs. “My knowledge base is broad but not deep, Ryan. Whereas you know everything there is to know about homicides committed in the state of California after 1935 but missed the part where we cloned sheep.”

Ryan supposes that’s fair enough.

He can work with a suspicion of feelings. He knows it’s Shane’s way of downplaying the whole situation so Ryan doesn’t go into a second tailspin of worry and concern about what they’re doing and what they _are_ and who’s gonna drop the L-bomb and when, but that’s fine.

He’s not being asked to prove anything, for now; it’s just a suspicion.                                                     

It also sounds like it could be the collective noun for a _group_ of feelings, like a murder of crows or a turmoil of porpoises. A _suspicion of feelings_. That feels right, because Ryan’s so full of feelings now that he could burst with it, so full he doesn’t know what to do with them all except to acknowledge they exist and hope they arrange themselves into some meaningful order in time.

Shane’s still looking at him out of the corner of his eye, patiently waiting for an answer to his proposition.

Ryan slides his spare key off his coffee table. He’s worried his nervous fingers will fumble it, but to his surprise they’re rock steady.

“Look,” he says. “This isn’t a _key to my apartment_. It’s just a key that happens to unlock the door to this apartment, which is mine.”

“Sure,” Shane says, eyeing the key in Ryan’s hand.

“I think you should—I think it makes sense for you to hang on to this, if you’re going to be coming over more. I take a lot of showers, as you know, so you might have to sometimes let yourself in.”

“That makes sense,” Shane says easily. “Personal hygiene is important.”

“And you might want to come over and visit with Ripley when I’m out of town,” Ryan continues, gesturing at the peace lily.

“I do have unsupervised visitation rights,” Shane agrees.

“So, um,” Ryan says. He holds out the key. “Here.”

Ryan tries very, very hard not to freak out about it. Shane already has access to most of his life, so this isn’t really a big deal. It’s just logistical. It’s not like Shane’s going to have a toothbrush by the bathroom sink or something. It’s not like he’s gonna _move in_ and they’re going to go out for brunch every Saturday and throw parties where couples play charades and everyone goes home by nine.

It isn’t a big deal.

Shane takes the key.

*


End file.
